CNN analyst: Here’s why Trump victory leaves Democrats ‘in the wilderness’

CNN political analyst Harry Enten explained the historical implications of President-elect Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 election.
Enten said Monday on CNN that Trump’s win and Republicans’ successes down-ballot have left Democrats in a lurch with no clear frontrunner for the 2028 presidential election. Trump’s victory also comes as President Joe Biden is slated to leave the White House with one of the lowest job approvals in recent history, according to Enten.
Enten said that 2028 is the first election year since 1992 that there is no “clear heir apparent” to run on the Democratic ticket. He explained that Biden was the clear frontrunner in 2020, Hillary Clinton was the frontrunner in 2016 and 2008 and Al Gore was the frontrunner in 2004 and 2000.
“This is going to be the first cycle, it seems it’s going back all the way to the late 80s, early 1990s in which there is no clear, early front runner for the next Democratic nomination,” Enten said.
He added that it good be “good news” for Democrats to have no clear frontrunner.
“Maybe they’re better off because remember Hillary Clinton, even though she was seen to be the heir apparent going into the 2008 campaign, of course it was Barack Obama who basically came out of nowhere after that ‘04 convention speech to go on the win the nomination,” he said.
“So it might actually be good news for Democrats that there’s no heir apparent, but the bottom line is, there isn’t one,” he added.
He also said Democrats in the past have looked to the current incumbent president as the leader for the party, but that Biden currently has the lowest approval rating for an outgoing Democrat president since 1980.
“Democrats have no real heir apparent, necessarily, except for Biden, but Barack Obama, at least an approval rating nationwide of 53%, right. Look at where Joe Biden is: 40% at this point, 40%. You have to go all the way back to 1980 … to find an incoming, departing, incumbent Democratic president to have an approval rating as low as Joe Biden is right now. When you make the comparison to Jimmy Carter on popularity, you know that you’re in bad shape,” Enten said.
Democrats are scrambling to find answers on what went wrong for Vice President Kamala Harris as she definitively lost the election to Trump. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) criticized the party for not appealing to the working class, while former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) suggested Democrats may have had a better chance if they had an “open primary.”
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